i love him - but i feel he has let me down. pretty much the same way i felt about my mom - who also did not protect me from abuse in the home.

for years i have said i was not angry at God. i was "confused" or "questioning" or "disappointed" or at most "resentful." because i did not experience the typical characteristics of anger, i thought i wasn't angry. i didn't ACT angry - i didn't FEEL angry - no elevated pulse, no high blood pressure, no shouting, no violent acting out - so i must not BE angry. well - i didn't feel ANYTHING for that matter, so that didn't prove a thing.

a few people who knew some parts of my past would tell me that i had every right to be angry. and some have encouraged me to express it. but i couldn't even identify it - much less connect with it - and no way could i let it out by communicating it through words or activities.

my anger was all stuffed down and locked up because anger was not allowed in our house. and if i couldn't be angry at a mere mortal abuser - with whom i had reasonable and legitimate cause for anger - how in the world did i think i could dare to be angry at (a "loving and perfect and benevolent") GOD?!

so now i am finally admitting it. and next i guess i'll have to do something about it. so now i am "disappointed" in myself - or should that be *ANGRY* at myself?

LEE

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"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself... And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity." - Paulo Coelho

This is such a good step, well done. God knows we have been hurt by those He put into place to provide us nurturing love and guidance. He puts those people there to show us how good and kind He is by their example. They FAILED! They let their abuse control them, and they abused us. God knows we see Him through their actions, feelings and lessons. He knows that at a certain point in recovery, we are going to hold God responsible for our pain, abuse and suffering.

Lee, He is okay with that, you know why? Look at the perfect example, Jesus. He NEVER became upset with his followers on earth. His apostles would argue amongst themselves as to who was greater, the loss of faith, the mistakes they made, when they became angry with each other, when they attempted to stop children from visiting with him, they abandon him in his time of greatest need and yet he admonished them to love each other as he loved them. He was never critical or judgmental with the faithful.

Approach him with your anger, your rage over the abuse you suffered. Jonah was angry with Him for not destroying the Ninevites, He was kind and patient with him. He will really listen.

When we can show God our anger, our resentment and disappointment, then we read His scripture and it tells us to be wrathful, but do not sin. We know He hears and feels our anger, that He is patient while we work out those toxic feelings in ourselves.

Be angry, beat your fists on His breast until you become weak with effort, then feel his hands around you as He lifts you up and you fall into his bosom safe, free from the abuse and the controls.

God can handle your anger. There are many examples in Scripture where people were angry.

Anger is a valid God given emotion. It is NOT a bad or negative emotion. We have no "bad" emotions. Our responses can be bad, but the emotions themselves are not.

I wasn't allowed to be angry when growing up either, but I WAS angry a lot. My mother even commented on it the day after I told my parents about the things that had happened. Strangely enough though, my mother was always allowed to be angry and could go off on us for hours.... :-(

Truth is she couldn't handle her own feelings so she really couldn't handle those things in others.

I know anger is a barrier I have with God. It is easy for me to write Him off, because I can blame him for the pain and stuff I didn't get growing up (like masculinity and courage).

I wasn't allowed to get angry either, so I internalized it. I'm quite talented at being passive/aggressive... :-O

Interesting though, and this might be something to think about for you guys. I am not angry at Christ, or the Holy Spirit for that matter. I AM angry at God, the Father. And I do have father wounds...

But when I think of Christ, I feel loved. Not so with God the Father. The Trinity stuff is confusing enough, now I have to sort out my feelings too. But this is a good starting point for me, a good revelation.

Jim

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Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever. -Yes, Starship Trooper

Codependence is doubly traumatic. We were traumatized as children – and the defenses we adapted to protect us caused us to traumatize ourselves as adults. We have experienced getting our hearts broken, our hopes and dreams shattered, again and again. We abandoned, betrayed, and set ourselves up to feel rejected over and over again.

Even those “family hero” types who achieve external “success” and financial abundance have to keep running from distraction to distraction and finding someone to blame so that they can deny the hole they feel within themselves.

Achieving some material success makes it much easier to maintain the illusion of ego control and stay in denial of one’s wounded soul. Being rich and famous can be a huge block to true emotional intimacy.

As long as we are reacting unconsciously to our childhood emotional wounds and intellectual programming, we keep repeating the patterns. We keep getting involved with unavailable people. We keep setting ourselves up to be abandoned, betrayed and rejected. We keep looking for love in all the wrong places, in all the wrong faces. Is it any wonder we have a fear of intimacy?

“Codependence is an emotional and behavioral defense system which was adopted by our egos in order to meet our need to survive as a child. Because we had no tools for reprogramming our egos and healing our emotional wounds (culturally approved grieving, training and initiation rites, healthy role models, etc.), the effect is that as an adult we keep reacting to the programming of our childhood and do not get our needs met – our emotional, mental, Spiritual, or physical needs.

Codependence allows us to survive physically but causes us to feel empty and dead inside. Codependence is a defense system that causes us to wound ourselves.

Some people, when they first get into Recovery, when they first start on a healing path, mistakenly believe that they are supposed to take down their defenses and learn to trust everyone. That is a very disfunctional belief.

It is necessary to take down the dysfunctional defense systems but we have to replace them with defenses that work. We have to have a defense system, we have to be able to protect ourselves. There is still a hostile environment out there full of wounded Adult Children whom it is not safe to trust.

In our disease defense system we build up huge walls to protect ourselves and then – as soon as we meet someone who will help us to repeat our patterns of abuse, abandonment, betrayal, and/or deprivation – we lower the drawbridge and invite them in.

We, in our Codependence, have radar systems which cause us to be attracted to, and attract to us, the people, who for us personally, are exactly the most untrustworthy (or unavailable or smothering or abusive or whatever we need to repeat our patterns) individuals – exactly the ones who will “push our buttons.”

This happens because those people feel familiar. Unfortunately in childhood the people whom we trusted the most – were the most familiar – hurt us the most. So the effect is that we keep repeating our patterns and being given the reminder that it is not safe to trust ourselves or other people.

Once we begin healing we can see that the Truth is that it is not safe to trust as long as we are reacting out of the emotional wounds and attitudes of our childhoods. Once we start Recovering, then we can begin to see that on a Spiritual level these repeating behavior patterns are opportunities to heal the childhood wounds.

The process of Recovery teaches us how to take down the walls and protect ourselves in healthy ways – by learning what healthy boundaries are, how to set them, and how to defend them. It teaches us to be discerning in our choices, to ask for what we need, and to be assertive and Loving in meeting our own needs. (Of course many of us have to first get used to the revolutionary idea that it is all right for us to have needs.)

As children we were victims – as adult we kept repeating the behaviors we learned as children – in one extreme or the other. The people in our lives were actors we unconsciously cast in roles that would recreate our childhood wounding so that we could try to heal it – try to get in right this time.

We were energetically drawn to, and attracted to us, the people who would treat us in ways that felt familiar – because on some deep level we believed that is what we deserved. If our own parents could not love us, then we must not deserve to be loved.

The reality of codependence is that we get in relationship with people who feel familiar – people who will repeat our childhood emotional dynamics. We keep getting involved with people with whom we can recreate the emotional dynamics from our childhood in some way.

A large part of the tragedy of codependency – the insidiously dysfunctional nature of the disease – is that by repeating the patterns we keep setting ourselves up to be abandoned and rejected. To feel betrayed by our own unworthiness. To reinforce the lie that we are inherently, and personally, shameful and unlovable.

“I spent most of my life being the victim of my own thoughts, my own emotions, my own behaviors. I was consistently picking untrustworthy people to trust and unavailable people to love. I could not trust my own emotions because I was incapable of being honest with myself emotionally – which made me incapable of Truly being honest on any level.”

We are attracted to people who are unable to meet our needs, who are unavailable on some level, as a protection from allowing ourselves to get close to someone who could be available to us – because then they would find out how shameful we are and reject us. Allowing someone to see into us, to see who we really are, feels to the disease like the last thing we want to do – and it generates incredible fear of allowing that kind of intimacy.

Codependency is an emotional and behavioral defense system that does not work. Our defense against pain and shame actually creates more pain – and causes us to keep repeating painful patterns in a way which reinforces the belief that we are somehow defective, that we have good reason to feel ashamed of ourselves.

Our fear of intimacy is reinforced by the evidence of how many “stupid” choices we have made in the past. Our experiences in childhood caused us to fear intimacy and feel that we were somehow unlovable – and our codependency caused us to keep creating new evidence of our inherent defectiveness.

Nasty stuff indeed!

We have a fear of intimacy for very good reasons. We have a lifetime of experiences that reinforce the original messages – that reinforces our feeling of being terrified of letting anyone get too close to us, see into us.

The only way to overcome our fear of intimacy is to get into recovery for our codependency – and do our inner child healing work so that we can learn to be emotionally honest and intimate with ourselves.

Integrating a Loving Spiritual belief system into our relationship with self and life is an invaluable step in taking power away from the toxic shame so that we can start to Love ourselves and be open to being Loved by others.

“Learning what healthy behavior is will allow us to be healthier in the relationships that do not mean much to us; intellectually knowing Spiritual Truth will allow us to be more Loving some of the time; but in the relationships that mean the most to us, with the people we care the most about, when our “buttons are pushed” we will watch ourselves saying things we don’t want to say and reacting in ways that we don’t want to react – because we are powerless to change the behavior patterns without dealing with the emotional wounds.

We cannot integrate Spiritual Truth or intellectual knowledge of healthy behavior into our experience of life in a substantial way without honoring and respecting the emotions. We cannot consistently incorporate healthy behavior into day to day life without being emotionally honest with ourselves. We cannot get rid of our shame and overcome our fear of emotional intimacy without going through the feelings.”

“The key to healing our wounded souls is to get clear and honest in our emotional process. Until we can get clear and honest with our human emotional responses – until we change the twisted, distorted, negative perspectives and reactions to our human emotions that are a result of having been born into, and grown up in, a disfunctional, emotionally repressive, Spiritually hostile environment – we cannot get clearly in touch with the level of emotional energy that is Truth. We cannot get clearly in touch with and reconnected to our Spiritual Self.

We, each and every one of us, has an inner channel to Truth, an inner channel to the Great Spirit. But that inner channel is blocked up with repressed emotional energy, and with twisted, distorted attitudes and false beliefs.

We can intellectually throw out false beliefs. We can intellectually remember and embrace the Truth of ONENESS and Light and Love. But we cannot integrate Spiritual Truths into our day-to-day human existence, in a way which allows us to substantially change the dysfunctional behavior patterns that we had to adopt to survive, until we deal with our emotional wounds. Until we deal with the subconscious emotional programming from our childhoods.

We cannot learn to Love without honoring our Rage!

We cannot allow ourselves to be Truly Intimate with ourselves or anyone else without owning our Grief.

We cannot clearly reconnect with the Light unless we are willing to own and honor our experience of the Darkness.

We cannot fully feel the Joy unless we are willing to feel the Sadness.

We need to do our emotional healing, to heal our wounded souls, in order to reconnect with our Souls on the highest vibrational levels. In order to reconnect with the God-Force that is Love and Light, Joy and Truth.”

Angry at God? Yeah! Surely He knew what was happening to me, but he turned his back like everyone else. Why? Because I'm just a worthless piece of trash. He had better things to do. Thats what I believed for years.

I've had some shouting matches with God lately. He hasn't struck me dead yet. As was said above, God can handle your anger. But there still is no answer to "WHY?". I finally had to put it on the shelf. Someday I'll see Him face to face and we'll have a long talk about it. Till then I just have to go on with my life.

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I will remember youWill you remember me?Don't let your life pass you byWeep not for the memoriesSarah McLachlan

Interesting though, and this might be something to think about for you guys. I am not angry at Christ, or the Holy Spirit for that matter. I AM angry at God, the Father. And I do have father wounds...

But when I think of Christ, I feel loved. Not so with God the Father. The Trinity stuff is confusing enough, now I have to sort out my feelings too. But this is a good starting point for me, a good revelation.

i'm with you on this, Jim. until very recently i couldn't even use the word, "Father," comfortably in prayer, worship, singing, discussion... but i have no problems relating to Jesus. I love the Suffering Servant identiy of Jesus - Isaiah 53, etc. and identify with his victimization. i know he understands how i feel. but when it comes to God the Father - it's like - how could you let that happen to your own Son? - like i felt towards my "parents." but then - i know that God allowed it for ME - for MY redemption - as a proof of love for me - so that logic breaks down. Isaiah 61 is a great healing and comforting remedy - and it states that God is the one behind the restoration process - so that is good. but i still feel the conflict of loving and trusting Jesus and feelling distant and untrusting towards God. it doesn't make sense - but it does in a way.

thanks for this insight, Jim.

Lee

_________________________
"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself... And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity." - Paulo Coelho

Don't forget, God allows individuals free will. He can influence others but can't make them do anything they don't want to.

Therefore, you can be angry at God, but make sure it's not transference anger (anger at him because anger at the actual culprit produces no response). God the father. We substitute God for the male we are pissed at to work out the anger.

Sorry for the cursing, but I despise my sperm donor with a passion and I could yell at him 247365 and he just wouldn't give a shit. So, I substituted God. I wasn't trying to hurt God I was trying to hurt my sperm donor.

I'm not the big, fancy prayer type. I wonder if God rolls his eyes at these people that say them, or chuckles and says, "hey, dude, stop trying to impress your fellow hypocrites and just talk to me like a friend." God said he was friend so I talk to him like any person. I'm sure he's heard, "Fuck, God, can you believe that shit?" a ton. lol Yeah, you can talk angry to your friend. Sin? Ah, well. His grace is sufficient. I ask forgiveness once a day or so and that's it.

The big thing here is I treat God as a friend. If I didn't, I wouldn't talk to him about inane shit most people say you shouldn't bother God with.

God said to "Go Boldly to his throne of grace" not like a wimp. "Yo, God, if you ain't busy...I don't wanna bother you or nothing" is dumb.

God is Jesus, Jesus is God, Holy Spirit is God, Jesus is the Holy Spirit, amen. I don't try to understand much cause God is a little weird, peculiar anyway. You can't figure out God, but I'm sure his butt is there forever.

I do end prayers with in "Jesus name, amen" because his name is power. Anybody can say "God" but not all say, "Jesus".

Get pissed. He's heard it all before. Nothing new under the sun. He wants a relationship like a friend above all.

A guy opens the front door and sees a snail on his doorstep. He picks up the snail and throws it across the street in a neighbor's yard. A year later, the guy opens the front door and the same snail is on his doorstep. The snail says, "What the f*ck was that about?"

phoenix - i never expected to hear stuff like this from you,i now believe in miracles!thank you for the words.Lee

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"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself... And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity." - Paulo Coelho

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